Yeah, if we accept that leaders and heroes are generally afflicted by this, then the suppression itself would cause a lack of those people in society, which could have really interesting effects. Lack of parasocial role models to project on to, as a subtler one than the obvious lack of leaders and front line troops.
As you say, the method of suppression could lead to some interesting emergent properties too. I keep thinking of Soma from Brave New World or Prozium from Equilibrium, or even social suppression like in 1984, and how difficult it is portrayed to be to suppress human nature, and how it seems to bubble up no matter what you do. That's a pretty nice theme that would surely fit in to any mechanism that would suppress "bad" traits.